450-Year-Old Cursed Warship Yields Treasure Trove of Artifacts

July 7, 2014 - For 450 years, no one knew where the Swedish warship Mars, named for the Roman god of war, sank
in the Baltic Sea. The largest vessel of its time went down in a fierce
battle in 1564 with more than 800 people aboard. Its discovery in 2011
yielded an astonishingly well-preserved ship, including the seamen who
went down with it.

Legend has it that the ship was cursed because its cannons were made using metal from melted-down church bells.

450-Year-Old Cursed Warship Yields Treasure Trove of Artifacts

July 7, 2014 - For 450 years, no one knew where the Swedish warship Mars, named for the Roman god of war, sank
in the Baltic Sea. The largest vessel of its time went down in a fierce
battle in 1564 with more than 800 people aboard. Its discovery in 2011
yielded an astonishingly well-preserved ship, including the seamen who
went down with it.

Legend has it that the ship was cursed because its cannons were made using metal from melted-down church bells.

Mars sank during a
fierce naval battle. As you’re
descending towards the wreck, you’re actually jumping into a time machine. In this case, 450 years back in time.

JOHAN RÖNNBY (OFF CAMERA):

We think Mars
probably was the biggest warship of its time when it was built.

RICHARD LUNDGREN, DIVER AND CINEMATOGRAPHER, OCEAN
DISCOVERY:

It was the legend surrounding the Mars
that go me intrigued as young
boy. I wanted to find her and kind of
see if the legend was true. But it was
also the challenge as it were to find a shipwreck that many other people had
tried to find but actually failed.

It’s part of a quite war.
It’s called the Seven-Year War where Denmark and Germany were fighting
Sweden together. And it’s about control
over the Baltic Sea. Control over the
trade on the Baltic Sea and the power of the Baltic Sea.

Mars is of course
a ship but it is also a battlefield: a frozen battlefield that went down just
in the middle of this fight.

It was an explosion on board so the stem part was opening up
so we think it went down very quick.

RICHARD LUNDGREN, DIVER AND CINEMATOGRAPHER, OCEAN
DISCOVERY:

In order to find Mars,
we used state-of-the art side-scan sonar systems. So the wreck is resting at 250 feet in a
remarkable state of preservation.

The cold and very dark water in the Baltic Sea preserves
wrecks in a fantastic way. So you can
see all the details on all the decorations on the gun and also the coat of arms
of the king.

RICHARD LUNDGREN, DIVER AND CINEMATOGRAPHER, OCEAN
DISCOVERY:

So the legend about Mars
does not only involve her size as a battleship, it also involves big silver
treasure—a war treasure. A we actually
started to find traces of that treasure.
We have started to find silver coins.
We know that one of the silver coins is estimated valued at 13,000 euros. And since there are 220,000 of them,
according to our records, it becomes
quite a heap of coins and value.

We believe that more than 800 soldiers and sailors actually
followed Mars when she sank down to
her grave. So there is quite a few human
remains down there, making the wreck site even more eerie to dive.

You can see lots of bones from these people down there. So the bones are surrounded by the charcoal
from the fire and the impact from the cannon balls and so on. So these people are laying right in this
frozen battlefield. I think that’s a
quite interesting part of this story that we could actually could study a
battlefield from 1564.

450-Year-Old Cursed Warship Yields Treasure Trove of Artifacts

July 7, 2014 - For 450 years, no one knew where the Swedish warship Mars, named for the Roman god of war, sank
in the Baltic Sea. The largest vessel of its time went down in a fierce
battle in 1564 with more than 800 people aboard. Its discovery in 2011
yielded an astonishingly well-preserved ship, including the seamen who
went down with it.

Legend has it that the ship was cursed because its cannons were made using metal from melted-down church bells.